The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  How old is Azra?

  Fucking questions again, Rora said.

  Was she in Sarajevo during the siege?

  Yes.

  What did she do?

  She amputated limbs. She is a surgeon.

  Mary is a surgeon, too, but she cuts the brain.

  Rora said nothing.

  Is she married? I went on.

  Not anymore.

  Why not?

  Do you ever stop?

  No.

  She was married before the war, for seven years. But when the war started her Serb husband loyally went up in the hills to shoot at her with his Chetnik brothers. He sent a letter from up there demanding her to join him. He said it was her duty as his wife.

  What did she say?

  What kind of question is that? She told him that it was his duty as her husband to go and fuck himself.

  ALL WE HAD LEFT to do together, Rora and I, was get back to Sarajevo. We stayed up and talked all night. I could not stop listening, and after I listened I had to speak, and so it went on. We spoke slowly, whispering, acknowledging the necessity of slumber.

  Once when I was on the front line, Rora said, I saw a magic carpet flying across the river. It was a blue-and-white piece of UNPROFOR nylon, but still I could not stop seeing it as a magic carpet. It looked sinister, coming to taunt us from a different world, where people still told fairy tales. It came down on the river’s surface, it bobbed and undulated going downstream until it sank. The Chetniks kept shooting at it, they had a lot of ammunition.

  I told him how much Mary wanted children and how opposed to the idea I was—I told her that I didn’t want them to live in the world as it was, but in truth I was afraid they would become too American for me. I was afraid I would not understand them, I would hate what they became; they would live in the land of the free, and I would live in fear of being deserted. The thought of Mary leaving me was ever present in my mind, particularly after I lost my teaching job, after I started needing her even more. This trip was good because I was the one gone, she was the one left behind.

  When my sister and I were kids, Rora said, we adopted a stray, mangy dog; we called him Lux, after Tito’s dog. It followed us everywhere. We trained him to obey and showed him off to other kids. Lux would carry our schoolbags. He would sit outside waiting for us, while we were in class, afraid he might be gone before school was out. And once we found him terrified and stuck up in a tree— someone had put him up there. Lux was whining, afraid to move, his paws clinging to the bark. Azra called him to jump into her arms; she was bigger and stronger than me. The dog jumped, he trusted her. She caught him and fell, he was really scared. She carried him home in her arms. But one day he was gone and never came back.

  I knew Mary would one day leave me because she liked being apart from me: she turned away from me sleeping; she was always willing to swap shifts or work two shifts in a row—her work kept her away from me. When we talked, she often looked off to the side of my face. When she went out of town to conferences she called me only after she had arrived and just before she would return. Our children would be miserable mongrels undoing their foreign deadbeat father in themselves, that was my fear.

  Once in Paris, Rora said, I was doing a married woman who locked her little son up in a closet while we were in bed. Her husband came back home abruptly and I hid with the kid in the closet, full of mink coats and silk dresses. The funny thing is, the kid seemed to be used to the situation. We played a mute game with our fingers, odds and evens, that sort of thing; the kid kept winning. The husband never asked or looked for the kid.

  Mary carried a picture of her seven-year-old nephew in her wallet, talked about him all the time: how he thought that the point of a lacrosse game was to catch a butterfly; how he drew God having many big eyes; how at the age of five he could dance those Irish dances. He was Mary’s little lamb: when we baby-sat him, she told him fairy tales.

  Once, in the war, Rora said, I was caught up in a burning sky-scraper. I had to keep running upstairs from the fire climbing up. On the top floor I burst into someone’s apartment. Whoever lived there was gone, but on the table was a džezva of coffee and a demitasse and a stack of photos. The coffee was still hot; the person had just left. So I poured myself some coffee and looked through the photos. Most of them were of a teenage boy: pimpled and scrawny, smiling cutely, looking at the camera with red eyes. There were a few pictures of the parents with the boy—they clearly lived somewhere abroad. You could see the neatness of the rooms where the photos were taken. Wherever they were, Sweden or some such place, they did not have to burn their own furniture to survive a winter. In one picture, there was a television set showing a soccer game, but the boy in the picture had no interest in it. The boy’s life was big, everything was ahead of him. He was going to watch a lot of soccer games, so he didn’t have to watch this one.

  You know, Rora went on, Miller once demanded from me that I keep taking pictures of children running away from snipers, ducking and hiding behind garbage containers, even though there was heavy sniper fire. He paid some of the kids to run back and forth under fire so I could take a perfect picture. Still, I felt bad when Rambo clipped Miller. He deserved a good beating, but not death. Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

  WE WERE OUTSIDE the hotel as the dawn was breaking, having slept for only a couple of dreamless hours. The literary critic was there, but not alone—there was a younger, slimmer man, named Seryozha, leaning on a Lada, smoking, his tracksuit pants tucked into pointed cowboy boots; his sweatshirt read New York. He was going to drive us to Bucharest, the literary critic said, in a feeble voice; it was plain that he’d been bullied into this concession. Seryozha grinned at us and offered to shake our hands. I was on the verge of canceling the whole trip, but Rora grabbed his hand and shook it, so I thought, What the hell, let’s go.

  I sat in front, ever the captain, Rora in the back. Seryozha had pictures of saints stuck above the rearview mirror, and a pine tree- shaped air freshener which entirely failed at freshening. The car smelled of sweat, cigarettes, and sperm—intercourse must have taken place in it not so long before. I did not buckle up, lest I insult him.

  We drove in heavy, tense silence, speeding as though pursued by the demons of police. Seryozha swerved jerkily around the potholes; he zoomed over the corrugated patches of the carless road. I convinced myself that he knew what he was doing, that, being native, he had a special connection with the aboriginal roads, that he could, passing a snaky truck, sense a car behind the ninety-degree uphill curve. In his country, cars were as smart as horses and people never died in road accidents.

  Fields of coy sunflowers, hills reticulated with untended vineyards, hutlike houses huddled in shallow misty valleys—they all passed by us as in a dream, accompanied by jumpy Russian disco Seryozha found on his radio. We flew by oxen carts and peasants walking alongside them who seemed to be standing still. The trance of moving forward, the pasty sleepiness of the morning—I passed out. I dreamt.

  I normally remembered only fragments of my dreams; I forgot a lot of them, too, though I could often abstractly recall their intensity. Usually, they had something to do with the war: Milošević, Mladić, Karadžić, and, lately, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rambo figured in them. There were knives and severed limbs and rape with random, sharp-edged objects. Sometimes, I would have communal dreams: we—and we included Mary (always Mary) and family and friends and complete strangers who felt familiar and close—we would do something together, say, play hide-and-seek, or spit-roast a lamb, or pose for a photo. We did it in Chicago, though once or twice we got together in Sarajevo, too; everything was always taking place before the war, though we always knew it was coming. From such dreams I woke up bereaved, for the we—whoever we were—the we could never be assembled but in a dream.

  But in the dream in Seryozha’s car, the only we were Mary and me: we were in a dark forest, walking a duck on a leash; George was playing golf with an umbrella among the trees and the b
all kept bouncing off the trunks. Then we were on a ship, and it seemed we were crossing a lake as big as an ocean, except it was not water but sunflowers. There was a boy swimming in the lake, his little curly-haired head bobbing among the sunflowers. Mary said: “We can get him when he’s ripe.” But then the captain of the ship shot at him with a sniper rifle and the kid burst like a balloon and, in my dream, I thought: That kid, that’s me. That’s not Mary. That’s me.

  In Seryozha’s car I woke up with a brick-thick chill of despair in my chest. It didn’t help that the Lada was nearly tumbling down a dirt road, along which dilapidated houses lined up obediently. There were apple trees among the houses, their fruit-heavy branches bending and breaking—everything seemed forsaken. I didn’t know where I was, nor who the driver was. I snapped out of oblivion when Rora lazily said from behind, I think he is planning to murder us. I looked at Seryozha’s stolid, scruffy face—he could in fact easily be a murderer. In Ukrainian, I asked him: “Where are we?” He appeared to understand, but ignored me, until I asked him again. Whereupon he said in Russian what I deciphered as: “We are picking up my girlfriend.”

  The girlfriend was a comely young woman in a short, glittery skirt utterly unbefitting the idyllic catastrophe of the village. Seryozha escorted her, gripping her biceps, out of a tiny, filth-roofed house, a thin ribbon of smoke rising from the chimney. He opened the rear door and shoved her inside; Rora scooted over to the other side. “Elena,” Seryozha said. Elena was redolent of fresh milk and glycerin soap; her cheeks were rurally flushed, partially covered with long, straight black hair. Seryozha drove uphill now; Elena looked out the window. A rabbit ran out in panic from one of the overgrown hedges; there were no human beings in sight. Maybe they all lived underground, in hiding from some peril invisible to me. By the time we reached the top of the hill and the asphalt, the car was hot: the smell of Elena’s skin turned slightly manure-sour. Controlling—if that is the word—the steering wheel with his knee, Seryozha took off his sweatshirt and cobwebs of hair sprung from his onionesque armpits. Nice girlfriend, Rora said. Elena closed her eyes and leaned her head back, pretending to be sleeping. Apparently, she was going to Bucharest with us.

  The roads were narrow and serpentine, curving against any logic between gently sloping hills. Seryozha lit cigarette upon cigarette, letting go of the steering wheel every time; he passed the rare truck and rarer car without regard for what might be coming at us; once we nearly pulverized a pack of dogs. I should have asked him to slow down, but I didn’t. The velocity paralyzed me; fear stirred at the bottom of my mind, but was very far from the surface. As a matter of fact, the passivity was exhilarating: it seemed this madness could very well go unpunished. But I did buckle myself up quietly. I felt Elena’s hand grabbing the back of my seat every time Seryozha cut across a bend; we shared the liberty of perfect helplessness.

  Lazarus bent over with his arm twisted behind his back by Shippy, who was calling for his wife. For a moment Lazarus did nothing, did not squirm, did not try to writhe out of the grip; Shippy kept pressing him down, clearly trying to snap his arm. Lazarus felt his shoulder straining toward a break, the pain fast arriving. “Mother! Mother!” Shippy shouted.

  We reached the Romanian border alive; the line of cars was short, the border guards were idle. The familiar fear of borders overcame me, but I disregarded it, as though it were a cold, and obediently gave my passport—my soul—to Seryozha. Rora glanced at me with what I read as contempt, but he delivered his passport just as passively. Seryozha seemed to have already been in possession of Elena’s so he handed the passports to the guard. While he was chatting him up, the guard flipped through them, then picked up the phone and, avoiding looking at any of us, called somebody. Seryozha turned to Elena and glared at her with a hissing gaze.

  I understood at that moment that the young Elena was not traveling to Bucharest of her own volition; Rora and I and our American passports were there to provide plausibility, a respectable cover—Seryozha probably told the border guard that we were all great friends, if not family. Rora must have figured it out too; Elena seemed to be terrified. And for all we knew, our illustrious, insane driver could have been in cahoots with the border guard, who was putting up a show for those who might be watching. We were in a bind; even if the border guard were honest and we could communicate with him, Seryozha could tell him that we were the ones who brought the girl along; we could be stuck in the nowhere land between Moldova and Romania, possibly accused of human trafficking. The border guard—and here it might be useful to give him some kind of a face: pale, mustached, squeezed between two large ears—the border guard asked me something in Romanian. The only thing I understood was “America,” so, leaning forward over Seryozha’s lap, I said, “Chicago.” He pointed at the girl and gibbered again. “Elena,” I said. “Bucharest.” Seryozha looked ahead, as though none of this was his business; I envisioned shattering his jaw with a sledgehammer. The guard gave Seryozha back our passports—he was definitely in cahoots with him—and he contemptuously passed ours to Rora rather than to me. Elena was probably going to end up as a prostitute in a Koševo brothel, or in a Bosnian hotel, or on a Milan street. Seryozha was going to pass her on to someone in Bucharest. We had no choice but to go with him.

  Romania was flat, the road dreadfully straight. Seryozha quickly hit 190 kph, put his left boot up on the dashboard, and leaned his head back. Elena was sleeping; I was passing in and out of guilty slumber, coming up with excuses for being in this situation. There was nothing we could do; Seryozha was packing at least a knife, probably a gun, and I did not want to get stabbed or take a bullet in the head; we had no other way of getting to Bucharest; it was better not to get involved; perhaps Elena knew where she was headed; perhaps that was her way out of the shithole; perhaps that was how she would put herself through college; it was probably her choice. Who was I to judge Elena? Each life is legitimized by its rightful owner.

  I was on the El once, on my way home from work, when one of my fellow passengers, a lady with a fox-fur collar and thick red lips, went into a seizure: she foamed at the mouth, her face gripped by a hideous grimace, her left foot flapping like a dorsal fin. Everybody on the car was stupefied; a couple of teenagers giggled; I could not think of anything to do, as I was not a doctor; I waited for someone else to do something. But nobody did; nobody was a doctor; the woman kept foaming and twitching and someone mercifully dragged her out of the El car. As we were leaving the station, I could see someone leaning knowingly over her, pulling her tongue out, stroking her cheek, showing the onlookers what to do. If Mary had been there, she would have known what to do, and it would not have taken her long to get around to it. And so I told her nothing about the seizure incident when she got home from her shift.

  I knew, of course, that if Mary had been in Seryozha’s car, she would have demanded that he slow down; she would have said something about Elena to the guard; she would have found a different way to get to Bucharest; she would have set everything right. I was glad that she wasn’t there, for her presence would have shamed me, as it often did. The Lada was trembling with lullabying speed.

  He’s falling asleep, Rora said, startling me. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that Seryozha’s eyelids were drooping, his chin occasionally touching his hirsute chest, the car swerving every so often. He was going to kill us; I could not think of a way of not dying; Mary wasn’t here. Elena exuded the musty sweat of mortal anxiety; she coughed and whimpered. She said nothing; Rora said nothing. It appeared I was in charge, except Seryozha was the one who held our lives in his hands. Perhaps, I thought, a quick death would resolve this uncomfortable situation.

  I had drunk and driven, of course, in my drinking days. And sometimes, late at night, driving away from whatever bar was feeling like home at the time, I would step on the accelerator and speed down the empty street, daring myself to see how long I could keep the accelerator floored before I chickened out. Once I had managed to pass through every light—a
few of them red—without stopping. The danger, the disregard for death, would clear my mind. I would park in front of our house and feel intensely alive, shivering with an adrenaline high. I felt as though I had earned more life credit, which I would spend in the better future. I would lie down next to Mary, overwhelmed with a sense that I was worthy of her love. She never knew how close she was to losing me.

  Seryozha was hitting the accelerator like there was no tomorrow. What’s to be done, I said, in Bosnian; I think I was saying it to Elena. Seryozha kept shaking his head like a rattle, slapping himself a few times—he did want to live, the idiot, he was just entranced with the speed and his power over us. The Russian disco was pumping; I was afraid of dying, but not afraid enough; perhaps I could survive this without exerting any effort. That was what life ought to be about, living without regard for death; this was a test. I looked at Seryozha’s drowsy face and thought: That’s me. And everybody was me, and I was everybody, and in the end it didn’t matter if I died.

  But Rora was himself; he tapped the hell-bent driver on the shoulder and said: Polako, jarane, polako. Miraculously, Seryozha slowed down, then pulled over at the gas station to splash his face and torso with water in the bathroom. Rora stepped out after him; I could tell he was tempted to slap him, but he lit up a cigarette instead. I watched the smoke emerge from his mouth and curl up into his nostrils. I did not feel intensely alive; I felt intensely nothing.

  WE REACHED BUCHAREST by the afternoon. We crept through the messy, unintelligible city, through the narrow streets that opened into vast boulevards that climbed up toward an insanely enormous building. Seryozha circled around an oval building that was plastered with billboards: Sony, Toshiba, Adidas, McDonald’s, Dolce & Gabbana. The young, beautiful, white-faced supermodels looked down on the streets from their unimaginable worlds, implying blatantly better lives to the riffraff presently pushed around by Seryozha’s fearless vehicle.